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united space agency—washington, d.c.


The general was in his element. Celeste McConnell could tell by his animated gestures, the emotion on his face as he strode in front of the sprawling holographic tank. He focused Celeste’s attention on images of the asteroid as it tumbled toward Earth, an unstoppable island of rock nearly a mile across.

“Icarus is on an intercept course,” said Major General Simon Pritchard. “It hasn’t come this close to Earth orbit since 1968. These views are from the wide-field-of-view cameras on the orbiting Leansats.” The window showed a potato-shaped Icarus rotating as it approached. It grew larger as the frames changed.

A picture of Earth filled another window as the general moved his fingers over the computer’s controls. A moving bull’s-eye scanned the Earth as the asteroid approached. Right then, the point of impact was crossing Brazil.

“If we use the SpaceGuard orbiting defense system—” Just at the edge of the screen, Celeste could see a missile, streamlined and coasting outward, with the insignia of the United Space Agency perhaps too bright and prominent on its nuclear tip. The proposed SpaceGuard missiles were intended to be directed against space-borne threats.

Celeste smoothed her business suit. She still found it uncomfortable, even after all these years. But Washington, D.C., demanded a strict dress code. People wore ties and three-piece suits while relaxing in front of a fire. She had never gotten used to it. She preferred the comfortable zero-G jumpsuits she had worn as an astronaut, seven years ago now, while on the Grissom.

Pritchard didn’t look up as he reviewed the simulation. Two stars were prominent on each of his shoulders. She wondered what he would have been like as a college professor, like most of the other PhDs she knew. Celeste suspected he had groomed himself specifically for her visit. He had set up the meeting weeks in advance.

Pritchard remained focused in total concentration. On the primary screen, Celeste watched a crater the size of a shopping mall appear over the asteroid’s terminator as Icarus tumbled on its axis. The SpaceGuard missiles streaked toward the craggy rock.

The situation here seemed surrealistic to her, a two-star general and the director of the United Space Agency alone in this control room. Pritchard had chased the techs and his aide away. He wanted to run the simulation himself; he had spent enough time training on the system.

“Missiles are incoming.” Pritchard nodded at the image of Icarus. She could see the rock moving, changing, tugged by the steep gravity well of Earth. The nose of one of the SpaceGuard missiles tilted, and a targeting cross appeared on the surface of the asteroid. On the third viewing window, Earth rotated, placidly unaware of the approaching threat

“Course correction.” Propulsion systems kicked in with a blast of silver-white vapor.

Pritchard’s eyes were wide, enraptured by the events. Celeste tore her attention away from the screens to look at him, maintaining a professional expression on her own face. His medium brown hair was tousled, a thin film of sweat holding it to his forehead. Wiry and sharp, Simon Pritchard did not look like a “Blood ‘n’ Guts” general.

“Ready, ready . . . impact.”

Brilliant orange and yellow flared up on the screen showing Icarus as the missiles detonated. “Now, either the yield will be small enough to deflect the asteroid’s orbit—” On another screen an orbital diagram appeared, showing the old orbit in red, intersecting Earth’s position with an ominous X; then a new path in blue projected a more elongated ellipse that carried Icarus safely out of the bounds of Earth.

“—or it will fragment the asteroid into smaller pieces. And that’s the problem. A lot of tiny chunks could hurt us more than the whole asteroid. The trick is to have the missiles diagnose the asteroid while in flight, then change their yield so that the asteroid is only deflected.”’

Celeste put her hands on her hips. She stood several inches shorter than the major general. “If you can convince anyone to be worried about the threat in the first place. Seems to me you’re just busy doing make-work.”

“The probability of an impact is actually quite high,” Pritchard said. “Right now, a kiloton of rock hits the atmosphere each year—and that’s just a lot of small stuff. Icarus is on its way, after all. Watch.”

The screen refreshed, showing an unaltered view of Icarus, still hurtling toward Earth. Celeste watched as the computer-generated views showed the asteroid tumbling end over end. It flared into brilliance like the Sun as it plowed into Earth’s atmosphere, boiling steam from the air so that she couldn’t see even the vaguest outlines of continents. It vanished into blood red and orange as the model tried to show the impact

“A couple of gigatons,” said Pritchard. “Just like what hit the dinosaurs. We’d all be extinct, wiped out from the shock, from the earthquakes and tidal waves, or at the very least smothered over the long term by massive climatic disruption.” His gaze seemed to bore into her. Celeste felt uncomfortable, but she paid attention. Something about Pritchard’s technique might be useful when she needed to convince members of Congress to support a pet project of her own.

Celeste folded her hands. She appreciated seeing this in a simulation room instead of enduring some boring lecture that had to be tailored to wide audiences and endless interruptions by aides and pagers.

With a jerk of her narrow chin, Celeste indicated the holography. All of the pictures had gone blank except for one, showing the globe smothered in gray clouds beneath which orange glows could be seen. “Is this a useful simulation, General?”

He raised his eyebrows, thought for a moment, then chose his answer. “Icarus swings close to us every nineteen years. The error bars of its 2025 orbit are almost overlapping our path. An impact will happen—if not Icarus, then another one. We’ve squeaked by over and over again. I guess it just depends on how lucky six billion people feel. Are we prepared if it does happen? Most emphatically no.”

Then Pritchard used a tactic she did not resent, though most other people would have been too frightened to bring it up. He said softly, “You of all people, Director McConnell, should not be comforted by the supposedly insignificant odds.”

Celeste fixed him with a cold stare. She caught the slightest quiver in one eyelid. If she pushed, he would probably back down and apologize. But Celeste didn’t want to do that.

The Grissom station had been wiped out by one such unexpected impact, by “space debris.” Two people had died, one of them her husband Clark. Celeste herself and five others had been saved only through her quick thinking and what everyone else had called plain dumb luck. The incident had ruined her life, made her an international heroine, and, propelled her rise through the bureaucracy, and eventually led to her appointment as director of the United Space Agency. Few people were willing to mention that part of her past.

“I admire what you’re doing, General. I really do. And in me, you have a sympathetic ear. I especially appreciate your candor. I have to put up with enough bull in twelve committee meetings a week.

“But now I must be honest with you. Regardless of the Icarus threat, whether perceived or real, your SpaceGuard defense system is not something I can sell to Congress. Nobody wants to hear about space-deployed missiles. Nobody wants to even think about them—even if we need to.”

The general set his mouth. “I didn’t calculate the probabilities that we’d be hit, Ms. McConnell. It was your people that approached us for a solution.”

Celeste reached across the table, palms up. “I realize that. But in the current political climate, even if the Icarus impact were an undisputed fact, it still wouldn’t do any good. Nobody wants to hear about a threat from space. No matter how bad it is.”

She beamed a smile at him. “Forget about Icarus, General. According to mythology, Icarus was a fool who lost his wings and crashed into the sea. Daedalus, though, was the interesting one who created dazzling new technologies. Come with me—let me show you exactly how interesting Daedalus has become.”


Celeste took Pritchard past the two stone-faced guards into the Agency’s Mission Control. The two guards, a young Japanese man and woman, scrutinized Celeste’s badge, though they had seen her a thousand times before. But recent terrorist threats by an EARTH FIRST! group had forced increased security. Before either guard could object about the general’s presence, Celeste raised her hand. “It’s all right. I’ll vouch for him.”

Pritchard started looking around before the reflectorized booth door closed behind him. Celeste saw his eyes widen. Mission Control was drastically reduced from those in the days of the Shuttle missions. Because of advances in neural networks, distributed processing, and sheer computing power, the United Space Agency did not need a room the size of an auditorium staffed by a small army of personnel to run the various missions; a handful of people in a large meeting room sufficed.

While Pritchard gawked, Albert Fukumitsu, the duty manager, waved her over. “Director McConnell, we’ve been trying to track you down!” He wiped sweat off his forehead. He had shaggy black hair tucked behind a headband. “Jason Dvorak keeps calling from Moonbase Columbus.”

“I had my pager shut off,” Celeste said. She had enjoyed her few moments of peace enough to make the headaches of being out of touch worthwhile. “Jason needs to stop panicking and handle a little more himself.”

Fukumitsu looked at her with a wry, skeptical expression. “This is a somewhat unusual circumstance.”

“Agreed. Did he launch the telepresence probe on schedule?”

“Yes, an hour ago.” He waved his hand toward the screens on the wall. One of the technicians, eavesdropping, called up a file that showed the hopper rising up in a puff of methane. “ETA at the Daedalus site in about ten minutes.”

“Long enough to get Jason on-line.” Celeste pulled up one of the chairs vacated by an off-duty tech and sat down beside Fukumitsu. “He’s probably fidgeting like a new father in the hospital waiting room.”

She still smiled at how unlikely being in charge must seem to Dvorak, and she certainly couldn’t explain to him the reasons behind her unexpected decision to place him in command.

Dvorak was an award-winning, innovative architect; he had grown bored with the mundane on Earth after having designed the impossible a dozen times over. Then he had used his connections to get himself an audience with the director of the United Space Agency. When he sat down across the desk from her, Celeste had had no idea at all why he wanted to see her. But when he began to spill his idea about revamping the entire moonbase, getting it ready for the explosion of inhabitants that would arrive as soon as the Mars mission was a success, Dvorak had won her over. “They are our pioneers,” he had said. “Right now they’re living in flimsy tents. Let me give them log cabins at least.”

She had approved his training and his assignment, and after nearly a year on the moonbase, scoping possibilities, reconfiguring some of the living quarters, Jason Dvorak had already made his mark on daily life up there. Without giving him any preparation time, she had rotated the former moonbase commander, Bernard Chu, up to the Collins waystation at L-l, while sending Collins’s former commander, Eileen Dannon, back Earthside, where her frequent disagreements with Celeste could be covered up much more easily.

At first, Dvorak had reveled in his dream-come-true assignment, but at times like this he was proving to be too much of a nice guy to make tough decisions under stress. Maybe Bernard Chu would be better off back down on the Moon . . . ever since the Grissom disaster seven years before, he had supported her in everything she asked.

But no, Jason Dvorak had only been in full command for two weeks now. He deserved more of a chance.

“Let me see Waite’s pictures,” she said. Fukumitsu nodded to one of the techs, who worked on pulling up the images.

General Pritchard came up beside her, relaxed in his Air Force uniform. “Daedalus—that’s where some of your astronomy equipment is stationed on the lunar Farside.”

“That’s right.”

The image of the crater as seen from Trevor Waite’s viewpoint appeared. “Zoom in,” Fukumitsu said.

The images of the Daedalus anomaly resolved themselves on a large window that blossomed in the center of the wall. Unlike the general’s computer-generated graphics, though, these images were real. She felt her skin crawl with an eerie foretaste of what would be in store for the world as soon as they understood what was really happening on the Moon. She had had nightmares about this.

“We’re still analyzing the situation,” Celeste said to Pritchard, “but I hope we know something new in a few minutes.”

On the screens, they saw close-ups of Daedalus, its flat crater floor dominated by pieces of the VLF array and the smooth-walled pit covered with a translucent framework. The general seemed to comprehend that this was something bizarre. “What is this? Where did it come from?”

At that moment, the main portion of the holowall was supplanted by a too close image of Jason Dvorak. His brown eyes were glassy with fatigue, his dark curly hair mussed, but his lips had a persistent upturn that always made him look about to break into a grin. He stepped back into better focus.

“Director McConnell, I was beginning to wonder if you’d be here to witness the probe.”

Celeste smoothed her trim business suit and stood into prime focus. She was petite, but carried a powerful presence. Her eyes were dark enough to look like black lacquer. Newsnet profiles insisted on calling her the Ice Lady. She spoke softly, letting her voice carry a chiding tone, but not enough to jeopardize her working relationship with Dvorak.

“Jason, I agreed to be here, but I didn’t promise to be early.” After a half beat of silence, she continued, “This is Major General Simon Pritchard. He’s here to add his thoughts. Perhaps together we can figure this thing out.”

Pritchard nodded with surprise, but he recovered quickly. The transmission lag meant that holding a conversation from the Earth to the Moon was a bit like a drunkard’s walk: two steps forward, then a pause to catch bearings, another two steps forward again.

Dvorak looked offscreen. He nodded, then said, “Switching to the cameras on the hopper.” The view expanded to take in a group of people clustered around him.

A large man next to Dvorak called up a holographic control panel that hung in the air in front of his hands. Other technicians in the cramped control center called out numbers and sent readings down to Earth. The window showing Dvorak’s image receded to the upper left corner, while new windows opened to display telemetry, a CAD animation showing the attitude of the hopper, and a rotating globe of the Moon displaying trajectories with a targeting cross over Daedalus Crater on the nightside. The largest window on the viewing wall opened up to show the probe’s view of Daedalus. Already they could make out the mysterious gossamer structure of the anomaly.

As the hopper flew over, Dvorak refrained from commenting, which Celeste appreciated. Nobody knew what was going on here anyway.

Pritchard drew in a breath as the hopper’s medium-resolution camera showed the arcs rising from the dust, the framework of a huge bowl, impossible lacy girders that seemed to have no support whatsoever. It looked as if some gigantic being had played cat’s cradle in the middle of a crater.

“Okay, getting some readings now,” Dvorak said. “X-ray backscatter shows the materials are extremely hard and light, not very dense. Like an aerogel, except made out of diamond fibers. Maybe it’s like the diamond foam they’re trying to fabricate in the orbiting labs.”

Celeste nodded. Dvorak’s voice took on a trace of alarm. “I’m detecting no sign of my crew. Nothing. Where the hell are they?”

“What is he talking about?” Pritchard asked. Speaking in a rushed whisper out of the corner of her mouth, Celeste filled him in.

“But how did it get there?” Pritchard said without taking his eyes from the display. “Look at that pit—to excavate that would have required a few megatons of energy!”

Celeste had forgotten about Pritchard’s background as a scientist “I know. But we detected nothing. I can show you all the traces. The Moon is a million times less active than Earth, and we should have at least seen something. But there’s been no seismic activity near Daedalus.”

The hopper flew over the wide pit. Was this some surreptitious lunar mining operation? Ore pirates? The thought was so ridiculous Celeste was glad she had not said anything aloud. Even under the dim nightside illumination, the depths of the pit looked as black as tar. If anybody was still working down there, they used no lights.

“Could they—” the general paused. He had balked at the word “they” as if afraid to suggest what he might be thinking; Celeste had already begun arguing with herself about the same thing. “I mean, could your seismic network have been scrambled somehow? The traces erased?”

“Either that,” she said, “or they found some way to excavate that pit and erect those frameworks without causing a jitter.”

“Impossible, isn’t it?”

“General, the entire thing is impossible!”

Dvorak interrupted. The CAD viewing window showed the hopper flying away from the pit. They had opted to use all of the vehicle’s fuel to survey the site completely, forgoing a return flight. “Maneuvering fuel is getting low. That’s about all the overhead reconnaissance we can manage if we want to guarantee a safe landing.”

“Set the hopper down,” Celeste said.

“Go to one of those tower structures,” Pritchard suggested.

As the hopper settled down on a flat tract of regolith, Celeste could see the sharp-edged tread marks of one of the lunar construction rovers that had erected the VLF array three years before. The base of a ghostly tower rose seamlessly out of the soil, cutting in half the footprint some worker had left behind. Dust from the hopper’s landing clouded the black sky.

Spotlights shone up into the weblike arches. In the upper left corner of the viewing wall, Lon Newellen played with the telepresence panel. The probe deployed its instruments.

“I’m getting no motion anywhere. Not a tremor, not a heartbeat, just a few jitters left over from landing. This place is as still as a fossil.”

Somehow the image reminded Celeste of the great Egyptian pyramids, or the sphinx, or some long-abandoned temple erected at the dawn of time. But this was not old. She kept reminding herself of that.

Data from electromagnetic sounders, mapping spectrometers, and five other types of sensors scrolled along the bottom of the viewing wall as Dvorak interpreted them. “Not seeing any radiation, no detectable energy surges, but the area temperature is about seven degrees hotter than we can account for. I keep getting ultra-transient blips on the UV detectors. Too brief to contain any information. I would try to explain them away as glitches, but they’re confined to a very discrete energy range. That doesn’t make sense.”

The image on the screen jerked with a blast of static, then refocused. The static returned, worse this time, and the picture did not wholly recover. The image skewed, with video distortion and graininess. Then the camera swung sideways, as if someone had bumped the entire probe.

“I’m not doing that!” Newellen said, holding his hands up as if to display his innocence.

Several of the probe instruments blared error messages. Two went blank.

“Turn the camera to look at the ground,” Celeste said.

Newellen’s own answer overlapped hers in the transmission lag. “Something’s screwing with the electronics. Failures are showing up everywhere.” The image jerked, as if some piece had just snapped off the supports. But Newellen managed to swivel the camera around, zooming in on the spiderlike leg of the probe.

The gleaming gold surface showed grainy pitting. As she watched, Celeste saw it fizzing like foam.

“The whole thing is disintegrating!” Dvorak said.

The hopper canted, then toppled over on its side. The image swung wildly to display the silent, gossamer towers stretching toward the stars. Then all the windows on the viewing wall filled with a thunderstorm of static before Fukumitsu closed them, bringing Dvorak’s image back into the primary position.

“I don’t know what else we can do,” Dvorak said. “No radiation bursts, no energy surges. I didn’t detect anything that could have caused this!”

“All right.” Celeste tried to sound soothing. “I want you to try again. If it’s radiating in the infrared, I want an IR flyover. Put a new sensor package into those javelin probes you’ve been deploying to take remote core samples for the geologists. This time, arrange for a sample-return mission.”

“We need a closer look,” the general said.

“I’m not going to send a person out there. I’ve already lost three people, and now this probe,” said Jason.

She paused to ponder her options. “No, we can do it remotely. Something in the area itself seems to be disintegrating our machines. We’ve got to grab a chunk of that regolith, then return. But I don’t want to risk contaminating Columbus if it’s something in the dirt. You can set up an isolated laboratory in the Sim-Mars module—that should be far enough away to keep you safe.”

Dvorak spoke again, sounding formal now, “I don’t think I have the facilities here to do much, Director McConnell. We aren’t a full-fledged research station, you know.”

She sighed. “I’m going to gather a team of experts to help you out. We’ll even send them up if need be, but we need to know more before I can choose.”

Dvorak nodded, still looking overwhelmed, but a bit more relieved. “All right, but I think it’s time we go public with this. Waite, Lasserman, and Snow deserve that at least”

“I agree. I have no intention of keeping this a secret,” Celeste said. “No intention at all.”

After Dvorak had signed off, General Pritchard remained grim-faced. Celeste placed a hand on his shoulder, which startled him. His uniform felt crisp and uncomfortable beneath her palm. “Well, General, how is that for an outside threat? I don’t think you need to continue your Icarus scenarios. Do you think we can stir up a little interest now?”


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Framed